


The Shared Path

by DameRuth



Series: Bliss [8]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:20:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24461191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DameRuth/pseuds/DameRuth
Summary: This is the "founding" story for the Bliss!verse, and the first written, though it doesn't fall first in internal chronology.  "The Parting of the Ways" doesn't happen they way it did in canon.
Relationships: Ninth Doctor/Jack Harkness/Rose Tyler
Series: Bliss [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/14078
Kudos: 22





	The Shared Path

**Author's Note:**

> Assume our trio became an item shortly after "Boom Town," and go from there. This entry's rather angsty, but future entries will be lighter in tone, for the most part. Enjoy!
> 
> * * *
> 
> [This continues the Teaspoon imports; originally posted 2007.06.01.]

Things looked grim on Satellite Five.  
  
Rose was rescued, but the Daleks were coming in force, bent on conquering the Earth -- just this one tiny space station in between. Things were down to final, desperate plans: the Delta Wave, organizing the locals into a last-ditch defensive force . . . and all of it seemed desperately tiny and hopeless, in the face of what was headed their way.  
  
The three of them stood together in front of the TARDIS before splitting up, hesitating -- too many words to say and nothing like enough time to say them. The Doctor raked his hair back from his forehead one-handed, the now-familiar gesture turned angry, jerky, and frustrated. He met Jack's eyes . . . and Jack knew, he could tell.  
  
There was every chance they wouldn't be walking away from this one.  
  
Jack moved first, kissing Rose, then the Doctor . . . and they weren't lovers' kisses. They were light and chaste: blessing, and farewell.  
  
"Seeya in Hell," Jack told them, then, with his usual cocky grin, and he was off to rally troops for the resistance.  
  
Rose and the Doctor looked at each other, and he could see she was scared now. Before this she’d still thought, somewhere deep down, that if they were all together, it'd be okay -- no matter what.  
  
"He'll be all right, yeah?" she asked, her dark eyes begging for reassurance.  
  
"'Course he will," the Doctor told her, because it was what she wanted to hear, and he didn't have it in him to be honest right then.  
  
\--  
  
_No time, no time_ . . . the Delta Wave generator just wasn't going together as fast as it needed to. No matter that they were already breaking every previous speed record for this sort of thing, there was just, simply, not enough time.  
  
And even if he could make it work, it’d never be selective enough.  
  
The Doctor looked at Rose, working tirelessly away next to him, no thought of leaving in her mind at all, and knew she'd die -- one way or another, Daleks or Delta Wave, either choice a horror.  
  
His gut knotted, and he just couldn't bear it. So he betrayed her, sent her off with a bit of scientific doubletalk and a passionate kiss that left her breathless. She trusted him completely, got in the TARDIS, and stayed there while while he sent her away . . .  
  
Even before the TARDIS had finished dematerializing, Jack was on the comm, frantic. The Doctor could feel it, too -- the sudden absence of one of their threesome, total silence coming through the linkages of body and mind they'd built up between them.  
  
_"Rose! God, Doc, what's happening, she's not . . . ?!"_  
  
"She's fine," the Doctor told him, tiredly, cutting him off. "She's where she belongs."  
  
Silence. Then: _"You sent her away?"_  
  
"Back to Jackie," the Doctor agreed. "To her family."  
  
He caught a faint echo of grief in response ( _We're her family!_ ), but when Jack spoke again all he said was, _"Good,"_ before he cut the connection.  
  
The Doctor went back to work, his hearts lighter and heavier at the same time.  
  
\--  
  
The hologram startled Rose — it had been recorded back before the Doctor grew his hair out, back when he was showing his prominent ears to the world. That told her how long he’d had this contingency plan around.  
  
She desperately tried everything she could think of, but the TARDIS ignored her and materialized on the street corner across from the Powell Estates — and then Mickey was there, and her mum. Rose screamed out her rage and frustration at them, aching with the sudden silence where the comforting presences of Jack and the Doctor belonged in her mind, spitting-angry that they’d forced her away in their time of need, and half-mad with worry as she thought about what must be happening to them.  
  
She got the idea of waking the TARDIS, contacting the timeship directly, and tore her fingertips bloody on the console — to no avail. So, it was Mickey’s car, and then a big yellow truck . . . which worked.  
  
Golden light flooded her mind, contact was made, and she took off without a second’s thought, leaving her mother and her best childhood friend gaping with surprise on the sidewalk behind her.  
  
\--  
  
“Last man standing!”  
  
The Doctor heard Jack’s voice with his ears, echoing down the corridor, as well as over the comm and in his mind. They were that close. Jack had thrown everything he had at the Daleks — every weapon, every trick, every trap, every doomed volunteer, and it hadn’t been enough to do more than slow them down by a few minutes.  
  
He worked feverishly, finishing the last connections, his hands working with their own intelligence, even as he heard the last pistol shots, Jack’s final defiance, and then . . .  
  
Jack’s death, like an icy knife between the hearts. He wanted to scream, but that would jiggle the final, fragile connection he was putting into place, so he bit down on it and kept silent.  
  
And then he was done, as the first of the metal nightmares rolled into the room.  
  
\--  
  
But, and there was the bitter irony of it — he couldn’t do it. All that rushing, all those sacrifices (he could feel Jack’s absence like a gaping pit in the back of his mind) . . . and he just couldn’t. Couldn’t burn another world.  
  
He bowed his head over the switch that would destroy his enemies if he could only bring himself to press it, while the Emperor Dalek mocked him. His hair fell over his forehead, almost in his eyes. Automatically, he reached up to brush it back, and was captured by a vivid memory of Rose and Jack . . .  
  
\--  
  
_The three of them, lazing about one afternoon in bed, nothing pressing to do, recharging their batteries before the next bout of running, as Rose jokes.  
  
The Doctor’s lying on his back with his eyes closed, but he can tell Jack, at his side, is propped up on one elbow, studying him.  
  
“What?” he asks, too relaxed to sound as sharp as he usually does.  
  
“I was thinking,” Jack tells him, “You could grow your hair out.”  
  
“And why would I want to do that?” he asks.  
  
“It’d look good on you.”  
  
The Doctor snorts. “I like it the way it is. Simple. Easy.”  
  
“Well, you’d get fewer cracks about your ears if you had more hair,” Jack points out.  
  
“Oi! Thought you liked my ears.”  
  
Rose, on the other side of him, has been listening with amusement. Now she rolls over and says, “Oh, we do,” and giggles — then leans in to nibble at one of the appendages in question in a way that almost derails the conversation completely.  
  
“But,” Jack continues, “they’d still be there, under the hair.”  
  
“Jack’s right,” Rose volunteers. “I think it’d look nice.”  
  
The Doctor grumphs at them. “This is the way I am. Don’t see any need to go changin’ it.”  
  
Jack settles a little closer, and runs gentle fingertips along the side of the Doctor’s face. “You’re not a soldier anymore, you know,” he says, softly, unexpectedly. “You don’t have to keep looking like one.”  
  
Jack can be remarkably perceptive at times. Annoyingly so, even. For the first time, the Doctor cracks his eyelids to look at Jack, considering.  
  
“He’s right,” Rose says, wriggling closer and resting her chin on his chest.  
  
The Doctor looks back and forth, between blue eyes and brown . . . and then straight up at the ceiling. He sighs.  
  
“You two, gangin’ up on me again,” he says, caving in. “I think that’s your favorite sport, some days . . . “  
  
“Some days, it is,” Rose tells him, her smile impish, and she and Jack go on to prove how very true that is.  
  
He lets his hair grow, after that._  
  
\--  
  
The warmth and safety of the memory was bitterly ironic, compared to the reality — one of his lovers gone, the other dead, and himself about to follow. _I’m sorry, Jack,_ he thought . . . but he couldn’t bring himself to feel sorry about Rose. Out of all this death and horror and futility, the knowledge that she was safe was the one bright pleasure he’d take with him into darkness.  
  
He looked back up, and faced his executioners.  
  
_Not a soldier anymore,_ he thought, mouthing the words to himself, and somehow there was healing in that knowledge -- even though he’d failed.  
  
He spread his arms and closed his eyes, waiting for death.  
  
Instead of the sound of Dalek guns, though, the next thing he heard was the TARDIS returning.  
  
\--  
  
Rose was back, but it wasn’t Rose — or not her alone. The TARDIS was awake, and she and Rose were acting as a single entity, hearts and minds willingly joined with a united purpose.  
  
To save those they loved.  
  
Even as he stumbled backwards, blinded by the golden light, and horrified to see Rose back in harm’s way, he was awed. He never, in his wildest dreams, could have predicted something like that could happen. It was utterly unprecedented in Time and Space.  
  
_“My Doctor,”_ the luminous composite entity called him, two voices speaking from Rose’s throat. And then: _”My Captain.”_  
  
\--  
  
Out in the hallway, Jack was jolted awake by a bolt of golden lightning.  
  
He drew air desperately into starving, burning lungs, completely disoriented. _I was dead, wasn’t I?_  
  
Well, dead or alive, he could see and hear and feel and move, and he knew with absolute certainty that Rose and the Doctor were _there_ , through that doorway. So he heaved himself to his feet, every muscle and joint screaming at him, and staggered that way, pulled towards them as inexorably as a compass needle seeking north.  
  
Rose and the TARDIS were two shining, avenging Godesses joined into one. He heard her name herself the Bad Wolf, and saw her turn the Daleks to dust — it was nearly too much for his dazed, reanimated neurons to take.  
  
But with the way clear, he moved forward, reaching Rose and the Doctor just in time to hear Rose say, “It hurts . . .” while tears streamed down her cheeks from her glowing golden eyes.  
  
\--  
  
The Doctor stepped towards her, and suddenly Jack was there, looking terrible but moving and breathing. For a dizzy moment, the Doctor wondered if he was, in fact, already dead, and in some bizarre afterlife with his dead friend and an angel who looked like the woman they both loved . . .  
  
“Shit,” Jack gasped, making the possibility of Heaven, at least, much less likely. “What’s wrong with her Doc — what can we do . . .?”  
  
“The Vortex energy is killing her,” the Doctor told him, his voice calm and even. “But I can take it out of her.” He moved forward, but Jack caught his arm.  
  
“What, into _yourself_?!” Jack said, horrified, reading his intent through their reestablished and rapidly-strengthening link. “Are you nuts? It’s killing her, and it’ll kill you too. We need to get her back into the TARDIS — she can pull the energy out of Rose, just like with Blon! Come _on_!”  
  
Together they managed to get Rose to the control panel, carrying her the last few steps up the ramp as her knees buckled and gave out. The light of the TARDIS’s revealed heart was blinding; both men turned their faces away from it, but Rose gazed into it, rapt.  
  
  
Slowly at first, then faster, the TARDIS began to pull the Vortex from Rose as she recognized the need to do so, to save Rose’s life and to restore her own individuality.  
  
The light dimmed enough for Jack and the Doctor to watch from the corners of their eyes as streamers of gold poured from Rose’s mouth and eyes, leaving her more human by the second. As the Vortex left her she strengthened, able to support more and more of her own weight, until finally she was standing on her own.  
  
The TARDIS began to close down the open panel, but then paused. A few last glimmers of gold remained in Rose’s eyes, and she tuned to look at the Doctor. He gazed back, still stunned by what he’d witnessed.  
  
Rose’s brows drew down, and the Bad Wolf told him firmly, growling a little as she spoke, “Don’t _ever_ do that to me again.”  
  
The Doctor blinked, then told both of them, “Never. I don’t think I’d dare.” He grinned with the truth of it as he spoke.  
  
Rose’s lips curved up in fierce amusement. “ _Better_ not,” the Wolf murmured, and turned her face back to the console.  
  
The last wisps of light pulled themselves out of Rose’s eyes, and snaked back into the gap in the panels, which then closed with a decisive click.  
  
Rose, herself again, swayed on her feet, then slowly sank down until she was sitting cross-legged on the decking. Jack and the Doctor joined her, and for a few minutes, they remained there in silence, holding hands and simply coming to terms with what they’d seen.  
  
\--  
  
Soon enough they were back in the Vortex, Satellite five left behind, and sorting out events as best as possible.  
  
Rose told them how she’d accessed the TARDIS’s heart in the first place . . . and then froze with horrified realization.  
  
“My God,” she said, “We have to get back there! Mum and Mickey, they’ll be frantic . . .”  
  
The Doctor started to tell her that they should stay in the Vortex for a while, so he could check up on her health and Jack’s — but Rose insisted, and the Doctor, still dazed and shaken himself, wasn’t in much of a state to resist. He set the coordinates, and away they went.  
  
\--  
  
Jackie and Mickey were still staring at the corner where the TARDIS had been when they heard a familiar, grating noise coming from _behind_ them, back at the Estates.  
  
They looked at each other, then turned and ran in that direction, leaving the truck where it was in the street.  
  
The TARDIS had materialized in one of her usual spots, in the courtyard. As Mickey and Jackie drew even with it, the door opened, and out came Rose, unsteady on her feet and supported by the Doctor, who handled her as if she were made of glass.  
  
With a cry, Jackie bolted forward to her daughter, ignoring the Doctor and the worried, dark-haired man who hovered protectively behind them both.  
  
Rose hugged her mother, and whispered in her ear, “We did it Mum, thank you, thank you . . .”  
  


* * *

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.  
  
This story archived at <http://www.whofic.com/viewstory.php?sid=12814>


End file.
